Hundreds of judges across the country with abnormally high approval rates for Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) payments awarded about $100 billion in lifetime benefits between 2005 and 2012, raising further questions about a program that could be insolvent in just three years.
An analysis by the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform found that judges with approval rates higher than 80 percent, about 30 percent of all administrative law judges (ALJs) nationwide in past years, awarded billions of dollars in benefits in almost 140,000 cases as recently as 2009. The number of awards has since declined to about 46,000 last year.
"Not all of those are incorrect but there are significant amounts," said Rep. James Lankford (R., Okla.), chairman of the Subcommittee on Energy Policy, Health Care and Entitlements, at a hearing Tuesday, adding that even small amounts of improper payments can imperil the program for the truly disabled.
"We cannot ignore glaring issues that are driving this program into insolvency," he said.
Almost 11 million disabled workers, spouses, and children receive SSDI benefits—a 45 percent increase from a decade ago—with average monthly payments of $1,130 for disabled workers and $300,000 total over their lifetimes. Social Security estimated in 2009 that less than 1 percent of more than 560,000 beneficiaries reviewed would eventually leave the system because of improved health, suggesting that many recipients stay on the program for life once they start collecting benefits.
Social Security’s inspector general and the Government Accountability Office have found billions in improper payments disbursed to workers who were not disabled and children in recent years. The SSDI trust fund will be depleted in 2016, according to the Social Security and Medicare Boards of Trustees, resulting in benefit cuts unless reforms are made.
Most SSDI cases that reach judges have already been rejected twice by local Social Security field offices and state agencies. In an interview with the Oversight Committee, Regional Chief ALJ Jasper Bede said judges with a high approval rate of benefits raise "a red flag."
One of the judges in Bede’s region, Charles Bridges, reviewed more than 2,000 cases annually between 2005 and 2010, with an approval rate higher than 95 percent in each of those years. Lankford said ALJs like Bridges appeared to "essentially rubberstamp people on the program for years."
Bede told the committee that Bridges accepted so many cases "because he felt that he was doing the right thing in reviewing these cases and paying them. And he still feels that way, that it was the right thing to do, that these people were disabled and they needed benefits."
When asked whether Bridges believed that virtually everyone who came in front of him was disabled, Bede said: "I mean, he pays almost all his cases, so he must feel they're disabled."
An investigative committee later reviewed a sample of Bridges’ decisions and found they were accurate.
One of the other judges in Bede’s region, David Daugherty, is accused of conspiring with lawyer Eric Conn to approve more than 1,800 cases between 2006 and 2010 based on faulty medical evidence, according to a report released last month by congressional investigators. Conn's firm earned more than $4.5 million in attorney fees from Social Security for the cases, and investigators found $96,000 in unexplained cash deposits in Daugherty's bank records.
Social Security Inspector General Patrick O’Carroll said in testimony that investigators also found in 2011 about $1.4 billion in improper payments to more than 500,000 "under 18" recipients of Supplemental Security Income, another agency disability program for low-income people.
The agency is working to improve its disability payment practices and has reduced the wait times for a hearing decision from a high of 512 days in 2007 to 375 days this year, said Glenn Sklar, deputy commissioner of disability adjudication and review for Social Security. Judges have previously said they felt pressured to quickly approve payments due to the case backlog.
Sklar added that the agency needs more funding to conduct continuing reviews of disability payments.
However, O’Carroll said Social Security could have saved $3.3 billion in 2008 and 2009 by conducting the same number of disability redeterminations the agency did in 2003, when it conducted 60 percent more reviews.
Structural reforms, rather than more funding, are most vital to ensuring that the truly disabled receive benefits, Lankford said.
Benefits for the disabled "are going to be cut the same from people defrauding it if we don’t solve it," he said.